Part 22

Remarkable development has been achieved in the shop by the most brilliant work on the part of the men who have applied cost analysis, favored by the fact that in the shop one has conditions of work which are practically invariable from day to day. It is possible, then, to compare the work done per unit of time in the morning, with the work done per unit of time in the afternoon, or for each hour in the day, and thus to determine the effect of fatigue of the operators upon their efficiency and the effect of such specific influences as the character of artificial light, the grade of steel in tools, and even the economic value of providing reading rooms, white─enameled lavatories, and recreation for the operatives. To cost analysis has been largely due the development of the special high─speed steels and an amazing number of improvements in machinery, entirely aside from the stimulus and education of the workmen.

In field work, however, comparatively little has been accomplished in the world at large along these lines, not because the opportunity is lacking, but because certain of the difficulties appeal more glaringly to the pioneer in the field, and offer some peculiar discouragements. The conditions are not uniform from day to day. The locus of the work is changing, the weather is variable, and a very large number of external agencies will be continually interfering with the scheduled regularity of the work. The method or process whereby a piece of work can be done more economically, may be instituted at just the time when some apparently trivial variation of the weather, or breakdown in a water system, or interruption in train service, may produce an entirely opposite effect which will more than nullify the advantages obtained from the improved process or method, and will sometimes cover a period of a good many days and possibly weeks, making it appear that the improved method is not only a failure but a dragon in disguise.

Field work is constantly presenting obstacles and difficulties which have to be met and fought, calling for emergency judgment on the part of the men in charge and on the part of all the men on the work to a greater or less extent; and here alone is one of the chief reasons why a contractor comes to depend almost exclusively upon the personality of his superintendent or foreman, to the exclusion of systematic analysis.

It is abundantly demonstrable that when results are properly charted, and when a careful record is kept of the causes of interruption and the extent of the accidental obstacles, the problem becomes much simplified. It is astonishing how intimately a manager may come into touch in a short time with the obstacles to his work, and with the most efficient methods for their removal, by means of proper reports and cost analysis, and especially by the intelligent use of charts.

=Effects of Weather.= The principal obstruction to economical construction work in the temperate zone, is due to _rain_. If it is raining at about the time when the men come upon the work, they will rarely fail to retire to their homes or to some point so far from the scene of operations as to make it difficult if not impossible to get them back upon the job if the weather should clear.

If a rain comes on in the noon hour, they generally leave and do not return to work. If it should start to drizzle in the middle of the afternoon, and the men are under fairly good discipline, they stand a very good chance to stay the day out rather than miss getting a full day's pay.

Next to rain as an obstacle is _freezing weather_. On concrete work, if the concrete is laid at temperatures below 22 degrees, and particularly when a slow─setting brand of cement is used, special precautions have to be taken, and even then the work is liable to be rejected. For work in which steam engines are employed, as dinkeys, steam shovels, steam drills, etc., continued cold weather is likely to result in the freezing of supply pipes, the freezing of valves, and the breaking of pipe connections, necessitating a good deal of frost protection and a well─disciplined and well─handled gang of pipe─fitters under a responsible foreman charged with the express duty of keeping the water lines clear. In very cold weather──say below zero──the freezing of water will seriously interfere with the economy of the work on the water end alone. Where steam drills are used and the weather is exceedingly cold, the steam from the drills blown upon the men condenses and freezes upon their clothes, involving great inconvenience and suffering. Under such conditions the men will not work so many hours per day as otherwise, and frequently they will not work at all at critical times in the progress of the work, to the great detriment of economy.

It has been observed that a combination of stress of weather a few hours before the coming of the paymaster seems to be more discouraging than at any other time, and it is seized upon as an excuse to quit work.

In very windy weather, more coal is burned than at other times; and sometimes a boiler which is capable of running seven or eight drills in ordinary weather will not be able to furnish steam for more than 70 or 80 per cent of this amount in the high, cold winds.

For the above reasons it is essential to keep a record of the temperature and weather.

=Accidental Conditions.= Besides the weather, there are a host of accidental conditions that may arise to influence the economy of the work and complicate a precise study of the performance. Some of these, named at random, are:

1. The blowing─out of the gasket in a main water supply pump.

2. A shipment of poor coal.

3. The wrecking of a trestle.

4. A derailment of cars.

5. The breaking of machinery on a shovel.

6. The burning─out of a boiler, due to carelessness on the part of a watchman over night.

7. The non─arrival of necessary and important material.

8. Irregular blasting, due to irregular spacing of drill holes, or to bad loading, or to poor detonators or a poor exploding machine, or to irregularity in the character of the rock itself.

9. Erratic action on the part of one or more of the men, due to drunkenness, ill─temper, or general contrariness.

10. Errors on the part of foremen in coöperation, some of which are not detected in time to be eliminated.

In working out any special problem, care should be taken that such accidental causes affecting performance──whether they decrease the performance or, as may happen, increase it──should be carefully noted and be a part of the regular report on the work. These features of a report ordinarily are ignored as being unimportant, but they are of the utmost value to the success of the work.

STIMULATING THE MEN

The art of persuading a man who is turning out 500,000 foot─pounds of work in ten hours, to turn out 800,000 foot─pounds of work in ten hours with a trivial increase in pay, is on its face difficult; but is by no means impossible, and a list of some of the ordinary means of doing this should not be out of place here.

1. =Watching the Work.= If, on the average work under the observation of a foreman whom they know, the men are made to realize that their individual performance is being watched and recorded by someone who is above and beyond their own foreman, there will usually result an increase in performance of from 10 to 20 per cent per man; and

## particularly if a tab is kept upon the performance of the gang as a

whole, the foreman will add his own stimulus to that applied by the men themselves, resulting in highly increased efficiency.

On such work as teaming, where teams are hauling earth along a road for a considerable distance, a punch─card is very valuable. The driver knows that the time of his trip is being recorded and compared with the time for the same work done by other drivers; and it has the effect of concentrating his mind upon his performance, which in itself causes him to use more care in cutting down delays and keeping his team up to their work.

In the operation of drilling, most valuable results have been achieved by giving each drill runner a card on which, at the completion of each hole, the time of the finishing of the hole is punched; and also the time of starting the new hole, in the same way. This card will then show the length of time that it took to drill the hole, and the length of time required to move his drill. He will be stimulated to move quickly, which in soft rock is an exceedingly important element of the drilling work, and he will be stimulated in the effort to get his holes down rapidly.

Where earth or rock is being loaded by steam shovels and hauled by dinkey trains, great economy can be arrived at by providing each dinkey runner with a punch─card or a report card on which he indicates the time when his train left the shovel and when it returned again to the shovel. This card then indicates the time for a round trip, and his mind is constantly being stimulated to look out for causes of delay; and, if he is at all conscientious, as most men are, he will instinctively attempt to make the best time. Some remarkable results have been achieved by this means alone in recent work.

When concrete is being mixed by hand, if a record is made of the time when each batch is finished, there will inevitably be an increase of

## activity of all the men in the mixing gang.

2. =Discharges.= The principle of natural selection of the men can be very advantageously applied. Where the supply of labor is adequate, it is advisable to make a rule of discharging a few of the poorest men every few days, taking on new men to fill their places. This necessarily results in an increase of the ability of the average men on the work, and it gives a healthy spur to the men who are not discharged. In carrying this method out, it should be done judiciously and with care to avoid discharging good men, lest the discipline of the work be interfered with. Any man who is not willing to do his best, or who is caught loafing deliberately, is an economic disadvantage to the work, and should be allowed to go. Likewise, any man who with good intentions is so dull as to hinder the progress of the work, should not be retained because of his good intentions alone.

3. =Bonus Systems.= An immense advantage can be counted upon by the employment of a bonus system, of which there are a good many; and it should be said at the start, that a bonus system may, although it probably will not, be opposed by labor unions. The general idea of a bonus system is to place the men upon a contract footing whereby they will be guaranteed a minimum wage, and more money than the minimum if they perform unusually good work. A refinement of this system may be applied where the men receive less than the guaranteed minimum if their work is noticeably poor. Where this latter arrangement should be applied, will depend largely upon the local conditions; and this feature is the one that is peculiarly obnoxious to the labor unions. Where the supply of labor is adequate, it is usually better to discharge the inefficient men than to attempt to work them under a depressed rate.

On a recent piece of work, the steam drills, of which there were 14, were averaging 4 feet of hole drilled per drill hour, the drillers were getting 30 cents per drill hour, and helpers 18¾ cents. For a period of ten days the drills were kept under the personal supervision and instruction of the expert in charge; and at the end of that time a bonus of 2 cents per foot for everything above 70 feet in 8 hours was offered to the men. On this basis no one could get a bonus unless he did 100 per cent better than the average previously attained. Exceedingly cold weather intervened, preventing a good deal of drilling; but within two weeks of the return to normal weather conditions, the average drill output rose to over 6 feet per drill hour, and one man obtained the remarkable record of 142 feet in 9 hours, or over 15.7 feet per drill hour. On this work a careful record was kept day by day, of the performance of each man; and the men who had a consistently low average were gradually discharged, thereby helping out the bonus system. The men were also under more or less constant instruction, and therefore the improvement was not entirely due to the bonus system.

A further modification of the bonus system is advisable in some cases, where an extra bonus is given for exceedingly high performance, such, for example, as paying the men an extra cent bonus, making 3 cents above, say, 90 or 100 feet per 8 hours. It is well, however, to apply this modified arrangement only after there has been an elimination of the poorest men. When possible, the payment of bonuses should be made at very short intervals, and not left to a monthly settlement.

[Illustration: A CORNER IN THE LAUNCH BUILDING SHOP OF THE GAS ENGINE & POWER CO. AND CHARLES L. SEABURY & CO., CONSOLIDATED]

4. =Bulletin Board Posting.= Posting upon a bulletin board in the storehouse or office, of the records of performance accomplished in different parts of the work day by day or week by week, is a very valuable adjunct to the other methods of stimulation. The methods above indicated will keep the men on the _qui vive_ during the day. A very valuable improvement can be instituted if the more intelligent among them can be led to think about their work after working hours. This must necessarily be done in rather a subtle way. Posting records at the end of the day's work so that the men see them on their way home, will do a great deal toward keeping the subject alive until the next morning. When the men have been led to a state where they discuss with each other the methods of improved efficiency, for the following day amazing results can be counted upon.

5. =Gang and Team Work.= If a certain number of men have been working together under one foreman on one particular piece of work, they come to know each other's methods and their foreman's methods intimately; and they necessarily will become very much more efficient than when they are shifted from gang to gang or when they have to work under different foremen. If the record of the performance of each individual gang can be obtained, and the men, as well as the foreman, are acquainted with the record, a spirit of rivalry between the gangs can be developed which will add greatly to efficiency. In making such a record, inasmuch as the gangs are likely to vary in size, it is necessary to have a unit of performance that will be independent of the number of men in the gang. It will be found that, shortly after the application of this principle, the men are themselves making suggestions as to improvements in method; and frequently their suggestions are immensely valuable.

6. =High Pay.= Some contractors have found it economical to pay a little more than the prevailing rate of wages, thereby attracting to their organization the best of the labor available. As a general thing, a man is perfectly willing to do 10 per cent more work for 5 per cent more pay per hour; and the difference in men is so great as to make it more than well worth while to secure the very best of the labor obtainable.

7. =Prompt Pay.= Men will work very much more contentedly when they can count upon their pay with promptness and regularity. There is nothing that demoralizes a piece of construction work more than the postponement of a pay─day. Special care should be taken that each man's pay is accurate. A man will seldom be over─paid unless there is "graft" on the job, but it sometimes happens that through errors on the part of the time─keeper or bookkeeper a man's pay is short, much to the agony of the man himself.

8. =Early Hours.= A good deal of money is lost by the men not starting to work promptly at the commencing hour, and by quitting before the final hour. On a recent piece of work that had to be drastically reorganized, an entire blasting gang rested on their shovels for over one hour, because their foreman had decided to quit without notice, and the man who was supposed to be in charge of the work arrived late himself, and was detained at the other end of the job. On this

## particular piece of work, it was not the habit to blow a whistle at

the commencing or the quitting hour, and the men started work in the morning and quit work in the evening according to their own timepieces. It was noted that nobody on the whole job quit a minute after he should have quit, or started a moment earlier than he was paid to start.

In factory work it is feasible to have all the men go through a gate which is closed one minute after the hour and not opened again for perhaps 25 minutes, so that, if a man is two minutes late, he loses a half─hour's pay. This has the merit of not working injustice to anyone, and, after being instituted, seems to be accepted by the men with a reasonable degree of contentment. It is not easy to start a strike because some men lose their jobs from being late.

Such a system as this, however, is practically impossible on outside contract work; and while it may be feasible to institute a modification of the time clock method, it is not known that this has yet been successfully done. Probably the most satisfactory way of insuring prompt arrival of the men, is to measure the output of each gang and make each foreman responsible for it, thus giving him a personal incentive to get his men on the job promptly.

9. =Enough Foremen.= It is necessary, in any organization, to have the chain of responsibility lead through a sufficient number of foremen; otherwise a superintendent or supervisor will find himself "spreading out too thin," and will be attempting to perform a lot of work that should be done by a foreman. One superintendent can supervise the work of 20 or 30 foremen with a favorable layout, and each foreman can supervise the work of from 10 to 25 men. If, however, there be more gangs than there are foremen, the superintendent will find himself trying to play the part of foreman in instructing the men, and not able to do his own work, which is to instruct and supervise the foremen. In the matter of drilling, a number of able managers are not in favor of having a foreman over the drills. It is calculated that by substituting a boy to keep the records of the drilling, and putting bonuses on the drills, the difference between the pay of a foreman and the pay of a boy is saved, with no appreciable loss in performance.

There are strong grounds for the opinion that there should be no process, such as drilling, without a foreman, where the work is on a large scale. When 10 drills are working, they will employ altogether 20 men on the drills, a number of muckers clearing the ground, and a pipe man. The work of these men cannot fail to be improved by their being at all times under the watchful eye of a man to whom they are responsible for the quantity and quality of their work. Aside from this, if the foreman is an expert driller, the instruction that he can give to the less able of the drill runners will be worth ten times its cost.

The same argument applies to all processes in the field.

10. =Education on the Work.= As a general thing, men who take money for their labor are more than willing to deliver a square deal to their employer; and it will almost invariably be found that the more familiar a man is with the difficulties and possibilities of his fellow─workmen, the more efficient he will be himself. For this reason it has been found highly satisfactory, in some lines of work, to change the men around on the job. In a certain concrete building 12 stories high, the upper stories were built in a small fraction of the time required for the corresponding lower stories. The greater part of the extraordinary increase in efficiency was attributed to the fact that the men were so educated that a man at the top of the building knew how the men at the mixer and in other parts of the job were doing their work, and knew that the superintendent in charge was measuring the speed of the deliveries from the hoist. The disadvantage of this method is that it takes a long time to work up the efficiency. It is, however, an admirable method for disciplining an organization.

=Discipline.= To the practical man, or to the intelligent student, there seems to be no necessity for arguing in favor of _discipline_ as an essential to economical field work; but so large a percentage of contract work in the field is badly disciplined, and the general principles seem to be unknown to so many field organizations, that a brief statement of them appears to be called for in this volume.

By _discipline_ is meant the cultivation of a spirit of:

1. Co─operation; 2. Obedience; 3. Responsibility; 4. Personal loyalty.

The subject will be discussed on the basis of _reorganization of work_, because here the chief difficulties are met.

The three types of organization that are most clearly defined in the way of discipline, are those of a _military nature_, _railroad work_, and _factory work_.

On construction work, it is not feasible to introduce a military form of discipline. In the first place, the penalties of the military service are not permissible; and in the second place it is not usually practicable to have so thorough a system of distribution of responsibility; while in the third place the same men are not here together for a long enough period to make military discipline practicable.

In railroad work a man is usually employed for a long term of years, on rather small pay, with a large chance of promotion. From the day of his initiation on the work, he is impressed profoundly with the necessity of protecting lives and of keeping trains moving all the time; and, in a short time, he comes to the frame of mind in which his pay, his personal convenience, and his personal prejudice are subordinate interests. The initials of the superintendent on a little slip of paper are sufficient to make him do almost anything within the limit of endurance; and, as a general thing, he does it ungrudgingly (but not uncomplainingly), and with a cheerfulness that is in many respects astonishing.